Re: Syntactic Diabetes (was Re: A friendlier API for operating-system declarations)

[Attila Lendvai <attila@lendvai.name>]

> lines of code. I think hyper-focusing on syntax to make services
> "nicer" might be the wrong approach here: You could greatly reduce the
> complexity by making them procedures instead of syntax and still keep
> most of the configuration readable to a great extent.


i agree. in my experience, it's good practice in general to try to make a functional API as convenient as possible, and if that is still too verbose or cumbersome, only then add a thin layer of syntactic abstractions that expand to code that uses this functional API.

such code is much easier to work with, especially when debugging stuff interactively (i.e. it's possible to recompile a function that will then affect every place in the code where the macrology is used).

the downside of generating countless macros is that they won't show up in backtraces, and they cannot be found when grep'ping the codebase, and as such make the codebase much less approachable. the size of their expansion can also become an issue if they are used often enough.

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